Adelie was taken aback. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “What would make me be desperate?” That was an odd question for a first meeting. Not to mention kind of personal.
He shrugged. “Desperate enough to put it all on the line for a silly white rabbit chase?”
She couldn’t follow his train of thought. Who asked questions like this? Still, this flirting was harmless. She’d be off and leaving the park as soon as Suzie came back out again.
Adelie rotated on her stool and decided to humor him, though the directness of his gaze didn’t help her pulse. “If I were going to be desperate, it would have to be over something I really wanted. Something that meant more to me than anything else in the entire world.”
“And that might be?”
Adelie rubbed her hands together and stared off at nothing for a moment. “Security,” she said unexpectedly. “Knowing everything is going to be okay.”
He considered her answer for a moment. “Sounds worth it,” he said, his voice deep.
She couldn’t believe she’d opened up to a practical stranger. Adelie needed a subject change, stat. “What about you? You’re not interested in finding the rabbit?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get what I wanted out of this,” he said, winking at her before standing up and striding away.
Adelie stared after him. Their exchange played over and over again with every step he took. Without a doubt, that was the weirdest conversation she’d ever had with a total stranger. Catch the white rabbit? Please. Chasing rabbits led Alice into a totally bizarre world that she couldn’t escape from until she woke to find it was a dream.
Adelie didn’t need the distraction of dreams. She needed reality; a new job, to make enough to catch up on their mortgage, and to keep her feet firmly on the ground.
People were visible through the windows of the fun house. They treaded in and out, flocking in a steady line to and from the front of the park. Looking beyond, Adelie allowed herself to be momentarily hypnotized by the whirling rides and the distant, lazy Ferris wheel.
“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” she muttered, bumping her elbow into the plate beside her.
The table hummed beneath her. The plate began to sink. A creaking noise sounded. The mechanical dormouse in the center of the table stopped his repetitive mutterings and descended slowly into the table itself. Cups disappeared, and in the middle of the transformation, as the table lost part of its contents, a cage slowly began to rise in their place at the table’s center.
“What in the—?” Adelie couldn’t finish.
Inside the cage before her, a fluffy, white rabbit wearing a red and blue-striped waistcoat sat and wiggled its nose. Its long ears went straight back on alert, and it stared at her with wary, red eyes.
“No way,” Adelie said to herself, pushing to her feet and staring at the transformation. Had she made that happen? She glanced around just to be sure.
“Look,” someone shouted. “Look at that!”
“She did it. That girl—see that lady? She found him.”
“She found the white rabbit!”
Noise exploded. Applause signaled behind her. People gathered faster than kids to an ice cream truck. The handsome, strange man appeared at her side, clapping along with everyone else. The expression on his face was different though. Intuitive. Almost proud, though she wasn’t sure how that could be.
She lifted her hands in surrender and attempted to step back, losing her footing against the stool she’d been sitting on. “I—I didn’t know it would do that; I swear.”
“Something always happens here when those words are spoken,” the man said, sidling close to her and leaning in to be heard over the crowd, which had doubled in size in minutes. “But not many guests know it. I’ve kept it a secret on purpose.”
“You—you kept it secret?”
“Congratulations,” he said, flashing a knee-knocking smile at her. “You’ve won the scavenger hunt.”
The crowd clustered around her. People shouted and whooped exclamations of surprise and amazement.
Adelie’s mouth gaped. Her pulse pounded as the roaring noise around her increased to a deafening din. The good-looking man removed a phone from his pocket and spoke into it with one finger in his left ear, waving over what appeared to be a news crew.
The ground turned to glue. Adelie glanced around in desperation. Where was Suzie? Had she made it out of the fun house? She was the one who wanted to find the rabbit, not Adelie. What was she supposed to do now?
“You look a little shocked,” the man said, putting his arm around her and guiding her away from the tea party table and to the open path between the park’s street and the March Hare’s house. “You’ve just won my contest’s grand prize.”
He handed a letter to her, one in the same midnight-blue cardstock with the now-familiar same gold writing swirling across it. Another quote from the book probably, but Adelie couldn’t bring herself to concentrate enough to read it.
“You—your contest?” She took the folded letter he offered and held it in her hand.
“Sure,” he said. “This is my park. And you’ve just won my challenge. You’ve just won fifty-thousand dollars.”
Adelie couldn’t think. She couldn’t believe it. She’d found the rabbit. And the man who’d been sitting at the table with her? Had been Maddox Hatter.
CHAPTER FIVE
Adelie’s brain had turned to cotton. Cameras flashed. Phones took the place of faces. The rabbit skittered in its cage, and someone pronouncing herself as Wendy Hendricks kept ramming a microphone in Adelie’s face and asking for her name.
“A-Adelie,” she managed.
“Got a last name, Adelie?” Wendy asked, tipping the mic to her. A man in a blue baseball cap appeared, cradling a large, black video camera labeled WV3 on his shoulder and directing it right at her. Was she being recorded?
“Carroll.”
Crowds filtered out from the March Hare’s house, squeezing in as tightly around the area as they could. Maddox waved to them in greeting as though completely
